


Assemblage

by fabrega



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 18:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6294271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some new Avengers, and they're maybe becoming a team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Natasha

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Age of Ultron and before Ant-Man, so this is probably not particularly Civil War-compliant.

"So how's the new team?" Clint asks, peering into his webcam. "You need me to come back yet?"

Natasha laughs. "You have an infant, idiot," she says, the insult fond. "No matter how much your kids like me, I'm pretty sure Laura would never let me back in your house if I pulled you away for anything less than an apocalypse right now."

Clint shrugs. "It's the third kid, so we've got a routine. Besides, I bet Stark would build us a nanny if I asked nice enough." They both pause for a long moment, thinking about the disaster that would almost undoubtedly be. "But seriously, I bet you've got some great stories about what a goat-rope these new guys are."

Natasha raises an eyebrow.

"You want to know what stories I have to tell right now? Whatever the hell Stark did to my tractor when he was here, it's been even flakier ever since. We've had three different guys out to look at it and none of them have been able to figure it out. Nate's got colic, so that's fun. Cooper and Lila found a one-eyed mutt down by the road and have basically adopted it, so now we've got a dog, I guess. Poor thing looked like it had been hit by a car, but it's hanging in there; the kids are calling it 'Lucky', of course." Clint scrubs a hand through his hair and sighs. "That's my life right now. It's exactly what I wanted and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but--"

"Sometimes it's nice to hear about somebody else's exciting problems?" she finishes for him.

"You remember that time that Stark and Thor got into an argument and the Tower got struck by lightning and pretty much anything that was plugged into an outlet had to be replaced? I want _that_. Tell me you've got some of that."

"Can't do it if it's not true," Natasha says, letting her face crack into a grin. "It's actually been...good. It's been really good."

*

No matter how much time the previous Avengers had spent together, how many enemies they'd taken down or missions they'd completed or celebratory dinners they'd had, the whole endeavor had always felt a little bit like walking a tightrope, teetering over the edge of an abyss of in-fighting and chaos. They'd been recruited as a response to a threat, all of them feeling obligated to participate and get along, none of them feeling like they could just walk away.

These new guys, though, they're all volunteers, and so they spend the first few days together as a team feeling each other out. Natasha is very familiar with this dance, being careful and overly polite and giving each other incredibly wide berths, proving that you're competent and friendly enough and absolutely not a threat. It's easier to step out of somebody's way than it is to argue over dibs on a battlefield, or worse, to wind up in inadvertent friendly fire.

Steve takes them into one of the new facility's giant training rooms on the first day and makes them each demonstrate on a series of training bots what exactly they can do. ("It's like Show and Tell," Sam whispers to her, nudging her with his elbow. She nods and chuckles appropriately; she does not tell him that this basically _was_ her Show and Tell growing up.) 

She's worked with nearly all of them before, but even if she already knows what their skill sets are, there's certainly something to be gained from seeing how they present themselves. It almost feels like reconnaissance.

Steve sets his targets up in a preset pattern, each one moving asynchronously in a small area. He steps back from them and watches for several long moments--showing off, Natasha thinks--before throwing the shield. It ricochets off each one in sequence before bouncing back to him. He grins.

Sam shoots one target before taking to the air. He weaves back and forth and corkscrews out of the way of the paintballs the remaining targets shoot up at him--a nice touch--before shooting the second and swooping down to grab the third by a leg, hauling it a good distance up before letting go. It hits the ground with a loud metallic thud and the lights in what pass for its eyes go out. Instead of gliding down, he shoots upwards, folds the wings away, and somersaults to a landing.

Rhodes takes more targets than the others have, positioning them seemingly at random across the room. He takes out two in quick succession with blasts from his suit, and dispatches the rest as they converge on him with a barrage of shoulder-mounted mini-missiles. He flips the suit's visor up and gives the team a no-nonsense nod.

Wanda gets a slightly different array of targets, half of them flesh and blood. With a sense of showmanship Natasha hadn't realized she possessed, Wanda asks the rest of the group to pick the human ones from a group of slightly-fearful not-SHIELD volunteers. She uses her powers to throw one of the bots across the room, stun one of the humans, and apparently cause the remaining human target to shoot the remaining bot. When she is finished, she smooths down her skirt with the palms of both hands.

Vision takes only two bots. The first he hits with a beam of energy from the jewel in his forehead, causing the top half of the bot to melt away completely. He approaches the second one calmly before phasing his forearm into its chest and emerging with a vital-looking mechanism whose absence immediately disables the bot. He gives no flourish, although Natasha does suspect he is somehow conjuring his own wind to make the cloak flutter behind him.

Natasha sets her bots up in a line. She runs at the first and shoots it in its head, using her momentum to push off its falling body and vault up onto the second one's shoulders, where she lets out the garrote wire in her cuffs and severs the cabling between the bot's head and its shoulders. From there, she flips down to the ground and circles around the third bot, grappling with it momentarily before extending the stun batons from her cuffs and short-circuiting it. It is hard for her to not punctuate the display with a bow, but she stifles the urge and all the feelings that come with it.

Later that first week, Steve sets them up in a giant training room full of realistic-looking debris and peons who are, for the purposes of the exercise, identifying as either enemy combatants (AIM, HYDRA, whoever the next round of idiots bent on world domination are) or innocent civilians who are potentially caught in the crossfire. It's part obstacle course, part rescue mission, and designed specifically to see how they handle themselves and each other.

Natasha keeps her distance from the others, isolating the enemy combatants she knows she can handle and disabling them with her gauntlets, keeping them corralled as far as she can from the corner of the exercise that Steve has designated the Civilian Gathering Area. She calls to the group when one manages to slip away from her, and she is aware that somewhere behind her, two or three of her new teammates rush to fill the gap she's left. She's fairly certain she even hears Vision apologize to whoever it is he just snatched the guy away from.

When Steve calls time--he hasn't been helping, just sitting up in a control booth somewhere observing and probably holding a stopwatch and, if Natasha knows anything about Steve Rogers, vibrating with frustration that he can't jump in to smash some heads himself--they have cleared the room. The civilians are all secured in the designated area, with Sam standing defiantly in front of them. The terrorist goons are gathered in a separate group, each tied up or otherwise rendered helpless, one or two still conscious and dedicated enough to their parts to shout overzealous slogans at their captors. Best of all, they'd done it without arguments, tantrums, or a surfeit of witty one-liners.

"That was _amazing_ ," Steve says, descending from the control booth with a gobsmacked look on his face.

And yeah, Natasha thinks, yeah it was.


	2. Steve

Steve almost collides with Sharon in the doorway. He takes a quick step back into the house even as his mouth, with barely any input from his brain, offers a wry, "Neighbor."

Sharon looks surprised to see him but offers a nod back. She is in jeans and a light grey t-shirt, holding a bouquet of flowers, and she looks suddenly uncomfortable.

"I--I was going to get some coffee," he says, gesturing vaguely towards the coffee shop he hadn't until this very moment intended to visit. "I could wait, if you'd like to join me."

Sharon looks down at the flowers and then up at Steve and over his shoulder into the house. "It might be a little while," she says. "You know how my aunt--"

Steve gives her a sympathetic half-smile. "She's having a good day today," he says quietly.

He sits on the front stoop and plays Kwazy Cupcakes on his phone until she comes back out, closing the door quietly behind her. He recognizes the smile she forces herself to give him and almost wishes he hadn't waited for her, until she lets out a sigh that seems to deflate her whole body and says, "You said something about coffee?"

At the coffee shop, Sharon holds her latte with one hand and gestures forcefully with the other as she tells stories, or half-stories, or whatever Steve has the clearance to actually hear. "It's tough," she says, "At this new job... Knowing I came from SHIELD and knowing who my family is, half of them trust me implicitly and half of them are twice as suspicious of me, on top of all the regular 'proving myself' I have to do. I'm on my third partner since joining up."

"They probably can't keep up with you," Steve offers.

"That's very kind of you to say. And it's definitely part of it, but..."

"Trust me, I understand." Steve squares his shoulders. "Do you know how many people SHIELD put me with before I ended up working with Agent Romanov?"

Sharon hides a smile against the rim of her cup before answering, "I do, actually--I received a fairly large number of briefings in those days that consisted mainly of Director Fury bitching about your inability to play well with others. I think he regretted that he'd already assigned me elsewhere."

Steve goes red, but does not argue.

"Enough about my problems, though. You've been relatively off the radar since your team nearly destroyed a small Eastern European country. What have you been up to? Anything you can tell me?"

The blush hasn't left Steve's face yet as he replies with a grin, "Finding people who I could work with."

*

Steve is aware that he shouldn't be as glad as he is that the Avengers are still needed after the dust settles in Sokovia. A good world shouldn't _need_ the Avengers, in much the same way that a good world shouldn't have needed him to volunteer for Project Rebirth. But he did, and it does, and here they all are, a group of volunteers willing to fight to keep humanity safe.

(He knows that the crisis of motivation he'd been facing before they'd taken SHIELD down had been put off nicely by hunting the remnants of HYDRA, fighting Ultron, and now this. Someday he will have to deal with being a man without a mission, but today is not that day.)

Steve is also aware that he should be content with the Avengers as they are; they're all already sacrificing their time, effort, and safety for the greater good of humanity. 

"I'm not sure you should do this, Steve," Natasha says, her voice low enough that only the two of them can hear. "You know how hard it can be to get a group together that isn't constantly at each other's throats. I wouldn't mess with it, if I were you."

Steve shakes his head. "That's what the Avengers are, though: a group that works better together than they do separately."

"We weren't working separately. We were all fighting the same enemy, in the same place." Natasha's right; they'd been called into action against a small but determined cell of AIM goons and had dispatched them quickly and easily. (The AIM goons had been wearing beekeeper suits for some reason, but Steve would rather that than regular-looking humans with the ability to breathe fire. If nothing else, it made them easier to pick out in crowds. He had to wonder if they'd thought this all the way through.)

Steve sighs. He doesn't know exactly how to explain it. "Just... Trust me?"

"Almost always," Natasha answers unhesitatingly. She smiles, and gestures towards the rest of the group. "Do your worst, Cap."

What Steve does is take the group on a field trip outside the facility. They walk out away from the building, and when they've reached what he thinks is an appropriate distance, he turns back to point at it. "Wanda, if I told you that you had to get up on that roof, what would you do?"

Wanda shrugs. "Go back inside and find the roof-access stairs," she answers.

"And if I told you that you needed to get up there in five seconds?"

"I would--" she begins immediately, confident, but she stops almost as quickly. Steve recognizes the flicker of remembrance and hurt in her eyes and realizes that _of course_ her instinct in a situation like that would be to call on the brother she was missing. She recovers admirably, though. "I would tell you that you were being unreasonable."

Steve moves quickly on, so that none of them dwell. "Natasha? Same question."

"I'm not sure about five seconds. Once I'm close enough, I have a grappling hook, but it'd be a near thing from here."

"Do you know what I'd do?" Steve asks.

("Something dumb, probably," Sam mutters to Natasha, just loud enough for Steve to hear, and she smirks.)

"I'd ask Sam to carry me."

Natasha gives him a sharp look. "You didn't say we could work together."

"I didn't think I had to! So if I told you all that everybody had to be on that roof in five seconds--" Steve sees the look that Sam and Natasha exchange, and before he can finish his sentence, Natasha has jumped onto Sam's torso and the two of them have taken off in the direction of the roof. A half-second behind them, Wanda throws a hand out to Rhodey and uses her powers to keep her aloft while Rhodey's repulsors propel them both forward.

That leaves just Vision and Steve standing awkwardly together. "Would you like a lift, Captain?" Vision asks.

As he stares down at Vision's ass--he's slung over Vision's shoulders in a sort of fireman's carry--Steve reminds himself that this is what he wanted.


	3. Rhodey

Rhodey sets the takeout bags down on Pepper's desk, and she smiles up at him and says into her earpiece, "I'll have to call you back; my twelve-thirty is here." Once she hangs up, she turns to him. "You were supposed to be my twelve o'clock."

"And when I asked you if you wanted me to pick up takeout, I didn't expect you to request food from a restaurant up-state," Rhodey shoots back. "You either get me, late, with slightly-windswept takeout, or me on time with your lunch scattered somewhere between here and there."

Pepper looks faux-thoughtful for a moment and then grins at him. She moves around the desk, her shoes kicked off, and digs into the assortment of bags and boxes Rhodey has deposited there for their semi-monthly commiserative lunch meet-up. "Thank you," she says around a mouthful of food, and Rhodey raises his own box in acknowledgment.

"So how have you been?" Rhodey asks. He's been occupied with Avengers business and the occasional mission for the military, but he knows that's nothing compared to the juggling act Pepper's got going on.

In response, Pepper sets her takeout down and pinches at the bridge of her nose. "Oh, you know. The market's been a mess since Ultron's little adventure in Sokovia. I have to explain to the shareholders how one of our helicarriers ended up in the middle of that whole business; thanks a _lot_ , Maria. And to top it all off, Tony keeps telling me that he's going to buy a farm where we're going to live?" She sighs. "I've explained to him that I'm too busy running the company with his name on it to go sit on a farm somewhere, but he keeps telling me that Clint's wife runs a farm all by herself and has fifteen kids or something, and how hard can it be? I didn't realize Agent Barton was even married, let alone apparently to Wonder Woman." Pepper takes a deep breath, lets it out, and takes another big bite of her lunch. "How've you been? How's the new team working out for you? I haven't really seen you since you guys really got in the swing of things." 

Rhodey grins. "Would you believe--?"

*

Natasha's voice comes across the comms. "Hey, Cap--"

Steve cuts her off. "Nat, I swear to god, if you are about to make the joke that I think you are--"

"Hey, man," Sam says, "If the shoe fits--"

They're fighting dinosaurs. Rhodey wouldn't have believed it if he wasn't seeing it with his own two eyes; none of them had believed it when the call had come in, and they'd joked on the way from HQ that it couldn't possibly be true. Then they'd arrived and been confronted by a stream of small dinosaurs emerging from a Midtown subway station into the crowds of people attempting to head home during rush hour. (For one ridiculous moment, Rhodey thinks about the dinos arriving in Midtown via train, each scanning a MetroCard at some station in an outer borough, patiently standing together in the aisles of a subway car, growling amongst themselves.)

The cops hadn't been prepared to handle it--turns out you can't tase a dinosaur, and it's better if a guy with minimal firearms training doesn't discharge his weapon into a crowd of panicked civilians--so the Avengers had been called in. Over the comms, Steve outlines a vague plan that mostly boils down to _minimal civilian casualties and minimal structural damage_ , which isn't much of a surprise. Rhodey steps into the fray first and deepest because of his armor--better the War Machine suit get gnawed on a little than one of the less-armored Avengers.

Of course, he regrets this decision almost immediately. He should have known that whatever evil genius had the bright idea to create a small army of dinosaurs wouldn't be content just resurrecting the damn things--they had to be _better_ , which in this case apparently means 'having teeth like little diamond needles'. Rhodey swears at the one that's latched onto his arm and blasts it off with his other hand before lifting free of the fray. From above, he can see that the dinosaurs are moving in clusters and maybe communicating; as one small group encounters a single Avenger, it looks like they call out to another group nearby for support, which results in the Avenger in question ending up hip-deep in dinosaurs.

It looks like they're not going to be able to brute-force this one after all.

Wanda is particularly useful in this fight; turns out that the dinosaurs' tiny brains (thank god--mad science usually tends to make monsters who are way more intelligent than they need be to) are easily suggestible, which makes them fairly easy to round up. 

The majority of the rest of the work is rounding up civilians and keeping them out of harm's way. Rhodey's suit has a loudspeaker built in, so he gets put in charge of crowd control. After the aliens, giant bitey lizards seem to barely faze the New Yorkers they manage to get sequestered inside several smashed-out storefronts. More of them seem more annoyed that their commute has been interrupted than anything else.

Rhodey looks down to find somebody knocking on the thigh of his suit. It's a little kid, maybe five years old, with hair in pigtails and an expression that is unreasonably calm for being surrounded by dinosaurs. "Are you Iron Patriot?!" she asks.

Inside the suit, Rhodey rolls his eyes. He opens his mouth, to argue or explain, but realizes that now is not the time or the place, and so he just sighs and answers, "Close enough, kid."

When they've rounded up what looks like the last of the dinosaurs, there's a short argument about what should be done with them. They can't just let them go, obviously, but there is some debate about whether they should be killed or somehow kept in captivity or otherwise disposed of. In the end, humane disposal wins out. 

"You sure you don't want to keep any?" Natasha asks Steve. "You guys could be friends, bond over the old times."

"Nat?"

"Yeah, Steve?" Natasha's voice is syrupy-sweet.

"You can fuck _right_ off."

" _Language_ , Cap!" Sam says, exploding into laughter, and Rhodey would not have believed it before he'd joined the Avengers, but he watches Steve flip Sam the bird. (Before, Tony hadn't ever stopped complaining about Steve, the righteous choir boy with a stick up his ass, and Rhodey wonders how on earth he'd managed to get that impression.)

They do keep one dinosaur, or at least a carcass and the scans Vision took of it while it was alive. Steve hands them grudgingly over to one of Hill's not-SHIELD-anymore research teams and they all hope they didn't somehow originate there.


	4. Wanda

"You're missing the party," Vision says. He had been quiet enough that Wanda hadn't heard him approach; she's not entirely she that he hadn't just floated up behind her. He takes a seat beside her and mimics her posture, hands palm-down on the edge of the roof, legs dangling over and swinging gently.

When she'd left the party, it had been in full swing. Rhodes and Romanov had been fleecing a group of not-SHIELD operatives at pool, Wilson had been plying Rogers with liquor from a small, elaborate-looking Asgardian flask, and Vision had been chatting solemnly with Maria Hill. The rest of the room had been filled with people she'd never met, or only met once before, nobody whose name she could remember, nobody who she trusted. Six months ago, everybody in this room would have thought she was an enemy, a threat. 

She had sat quietly in the corner by herself until it was more than she could take, and then she'd escaped to the roof. "I'm not much for parties," she tells Vision quietly, looking out into the dark night. "Besides, it's not like anyone is missing me."

Vision chuckles. "I did." This earns him a small smile. "You're a part of this team," he continues. "They'd miss you in a fight; why wouldn't they miss you at a party?"

Wanda waves her hands vaguely, a substitute for the thoughts she has about who she is and what she's done that she can't quite form into sentences. She settles, eventually, on, "We're not friends."

She's surprised by the hurt look on Vision's face. "Are we not?"

*

Wanda is pretty sure that, of the Avengers, she's probably the only one without a real home to call her own. Wilson had a job and a house in DC; Rogers and Romanov talk about living in DC too, and had to have been staying somewhere before they ended up in Sokovia; Rhodes was on loan from Stark Industries to the Air Force or vice versa, with places to stay on each side; and Vision had been offered a home with both Stark _and_ Thor. That just leaves her, feeling again like Tony Stark had exploded into the middle of her life and left her homeless.

After Sokovia, Wanda had joined the Avengers partly because she thought she'd already joined them. Barton had given an extremely convincing pep talk mid-battle and had, as far as she could tell, made her an Avenger right then and there. Sure, Rogers had given her a different, slightly less convincing speech after about how her life was hers now and given her the choice of joining up officially, of staying, but it had felt perfunctory, like he hadn't expected her to say anything but yes.

She had said yes.

She's got quarters in the new Avengers complex--they all do, fairly spacious sets of bedrooms and bathrooms and offices branching off from a shared kitchen and lounge area. She doesn't have a lot of things, and only certain corners of her rooms feel lived in: a heap of clothes, a StarkPad, a clutter of toiletries. It is a small, solitary existence, but, she supposes, less small and solitary than the way she had lived with what turned out to be HYDRA. They'd had her in a cell. Here, she is free to roam, to travel, to do as she likes--there's just not much she wants to do.

It feels like another cage she's chosen to be in.

When she is the only one who is living in the complex, she doesn't venture outside her room much, but she likes knowing that she has the option, and she leaves her door open most of the time. She listens to loud music. She cooks and eats a lot of Sokovian dishes she and Pietro had liked when they were little, and she leaves her pots and pans in the sink. She reads voraciously. She cries sometimes.

Then the Avengers plans are solidified and everybody else moves in. What had been her solitary routine in and around the space she expected never to share suddenly has other people in the middle of it, cooking meals, watching TV, bantering back and forth with one another in a way that, if Wanda had ever known how, she's long since forgotten. It involves an ease and familiarity she hasn't had with anyone since, well...

She retires to her room, stays small and quiet and a little bit angry. She's not angry _at_ anybody, not really, but she'd had this picture in her head of what this life was going to be like, and it's so much harder to avoid your teammates when they're all on top of you.

Early one morning, there's a knock on her door. She's still in bed, but she manages to roll out and answer it, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. This has happened once or twice before and it's been maintenance or housekeeping, but this time Sam Wilson is there; he looks apologetic and faintly concerned.

"Did I wake you?" he asks.

Wanda waves one hand vaguely and covers a yawn with the back of the other. "What do you want?"

"We were wondering if you wanted to come see about breakfast. Vision said he's going to cook, and we're, uh, we're taking bets." Wanda tilts her head and narrows her eyes, and he rushes to clarify. "Nobody doubts that he _can_ cook, it's just... how's it going to taste. Steve thinks that anybody can learn to cook just fine from the internet, but Rhodey has some pretty gross stories of Tony Stark's bots making smoothies, so it could go either way."

"What does Vision think?"

He gives her a coy look. "You could come ask yourself?"

It's pretty obviously just meant to get her out of her room, but she's up now and she _is_ hungry. She pulls her heavy bathrobe on over her pajamas, shuffles into some slippers, pulls the door to her quarters closed behind her, and sojourns to the shared kitchen.

Vision is at the stove, hovering--metaphorically--over three separate skillets. Everything smells really good so far; at this point, Wanda is going to have to put her money on internet-acquired cooking skills working out just fine.

The others are standing around the large kitchen island in varying kinds of pajamas. Wanda knows that the ones she's wearing had been provided along with the bedroom she's staying in, and she wonders if the others had been provided the same thing. She's not sure which she likes better: the idea that Steve Rogers had been given and chosen to wear flannel pants with bald eagles on them, or that he'd already owned them before. Either way, he hands her a cup of coffee and smiles at her, and she thinks that maybe someday this could feel like home.


	5. Sam

Sam has already started on a beer and an appetizer when Maria finally sits down across from him. She sets a large package down on the corner of the table as she lowers herself into the booth, and the beer sloshes gently in Sam's glass.

"Sorry I'm late," she says, "I had to make an extra stop." She gestures at the package. It's wrapped in brown paper and tape and, from its size and shape, Sam is pretty sure it's a new set of Falcon wings. "Try to keep these in one piece, okay? They're expensive to replace."

"Hey, the last ones were in one piece, they just...had with some extra holes in them." Better them than Sam himself--he'd taken two bullets directly in the wing pack and one had grazed his shoulder on their last mission out. All things considered, it could've gone a lot worse. He snags the package and sets it next to him on the booth seat. "Why are you giving these to me here? Last set, we were in a big room with Tony Stark and a bunch of old white guys on Skype, and this time we're--" He trails off, not quite sure how to describe the bar where they occasionally meet up to exchange intel on Steve's ongoing manhunt. (When she'd first suggested they meet for this purpose, he'd wanted to take her someplace nicer, show her a good time, but she had refused on principle, and thus here, with beer and burgers and a too-loud sound system.)

"They're the World Security Council," Maria says, grabbing a nacho from Sam's appetizer plate. "And that was your official Avengers swearing in, if such a thing exists. This is a little more under the table." Sam blinks at her in surprise as she continues, "Tony Stark doesn't know about these."

"I thought he made them?"

Maria leans forward. "What do you know about Wakanda?"

"The country? Not much," Sam admits. "But isn't that kind of by design? They're real insular, rumored to be very technologically-advanced." He stops and thinks about why she might be asking. He knows that some vibranium went into the last pair (Stark had picked it up somewhere vague during that business with Ultron) but... "Did they--" he begins to ask.

Maria shakes her head. "Can't tell you that. Just...take whatever or whoever you're thinking of and make it about five times more important and you're probably close."

Sam is very careful to keep his face impassive, and he takes a strategic swig of his beer. Below the table, he lets on hand settle on the still-wrapped package.

"So how _did_ you lose your last set?"

Instead of answering, Sam asks, "Was there something wrong with the debrief I gave your people when we got back from that mission?" 

(He doesn't bring up how increasingly uncomfortable he's become over the past few months reporting to what essentially amounts to a private sector national intelligence agency, how uncomfortable he is that such a thing even exists, how many conversations he and Steve and the rest of them have had about whether the protections for citizens that are written into the Constitution--things like unreasonable search and seizure, habeas corpus, or cruel and unusual punishment--apply when the organization isn't actually under government control. That's a conversation for another day, maybe; Sam doesn't like feeling like he can be bought off, but Maria _did_ just give him these new wings.)

Maria shrugs and eats another nacho. "Something just seemed a little off to me." Sam probably shouldn't be surprised. Maria's a smart woman, and no matter how many times Steve coached them through their answers, she was bound to wonder.

"Everybody has off-days," Sam says. He's still not going to tell her, but--

*

Steve has been careful not to let what he and Sam are doing in their off-time, their missing persons hunt, overlap into their Avengers day job. Natasha knows what it is that they occasionally sneak off to do--investigate a sighting or rummage through the newly-wrecked remains of a base or a safehouse--but to everyone else, they just disappear mysteriously between missions sometimes. (They're not the only ones, Sam is sure. Rhodey still gets calls from the Air Force sometimes, and he's pretty sure that Hill and Fury have cashed in a favor or two from Natasha that require her to go missing for a while.)

They are getting closer but are not close, and while intellectually Sam knew that this wasn't going to be easy, the way Steve's hands clench and unclench helplessly at his sides every time they find some new, terrible piece of the puzzle or just barely miss their target makes Sam want to put his fist through a wall.

That's why it's so shocking when they're called out to Avengers business and in the middle of the melee, a goon in front of Sam just _drops_ , one single, clean bullet hole between his eyes. Sam offers his thanks on the comms as he fights his way over to Steve, but nobody acknowledges giving him the assist. Then another one falls, this one by Steve, and then two more, and Sam turns to look. The angle of those shots, the position of his teammates, there's no way that they could have--

In the distance, a glint of silver and then another shot.

"Steve," Sam says, his heart suddenly pounding hard, "I think that's--"

But, of course, Steve is three steps ahead of him, turned to look at the source of the shots with a stunned look on his face. (He hits two guys off to his left without looking, the showoff.) "We thought we were following him, but--"

One of the enemies gets past Steve's shield and stabs him two, three times in the side, deep wounds that cause Steve to drop to the ground, swearing. Sam swears too, puts a bullet in the guy's knee and then one in his shoulder, and calls for backup on the comms. He hears Natasha's sharp intake of breath, and almost immediately Rhodey and Vision are above the fray and making their way towards Sam and Steve.

Once enemies are not an immediate concern, Sam drops to the ground next to Steve and, propped behind Steve's shield, examines the wounds. His field medic training kicks in and he extracts some gauze from a pouch at his waist and presses it up against the places Steve is bleeding. Steve winces but tries to otherwise be quiet and still, taking the gauze from Sam when he offers it and holding it tight against the wounds.

"Do we have an exit Steve could take?" Sam asks the others standing over them. When he looks up, Rhodey and Vision are gone, and Wanda has taken their place.

"Can't have evac here for another few minutes," Natasha says on the comms. "But even then, I don't see any place for them to set down."

"I'll make it that long," Steve says irritably. "Hell, just get me vertical, and--"

Sam shoots him a warning look. "Stay here. I'm going to find you a way out," Sam says. He turns to Wanda. "You got this?"

She looks at the surrounding enemies; Sam can almost see her doing the calculations in her head. "Go," she says, nodding with a grim determination.

"I'll be back once I've found a good place the jet can land, maybe clear a path." 

Without waiting for Steve to disagree, he expands his wings and spirals upwards, dodging the fire that's suddenly aimed his way. It looks like the field is clearing a little bit, but there's still no good space to get Steve to for evac. He glances back--Steve and Wanda are huddled in the middle of a group of enemies, in a haze of red magic. The enemies are facing outwards and slicing down any foes that get within arm's reach. "What the hell do they need me for," Sam mutters to himself.

Then he spots it, a ripple in the mass of enemies they're facing, moving steadily towards Steve. His eyes dart around the battlefield, accounting for all the other Avengers: Steve and Wanda are right where he expects them to be; Rhodey is soaring just out of arm's reach above the enemies, gleefully picking them off one by one; and Natasha and Vision are back-to-back, a crowd of enemies surrounding them warily. That does not leave anyone unaccounted for, except--

Sam swears again, takes one last, long look around, and dives back towards Steve and Wanda, arriving scant seconds before the blur he'd been tracking across the battlefield. 

"I said that I could handle it," Wanda hisses at Sam, right before she is shoved heavily out of the way by a strong metal arm. She goes flying, but not very far; as the Winter Soldier kneels in front of Steve, his flesh hand hovering tentatively above Steve's wounds, she comes roaring back to Steve's side, her own hand outstretched, ready to work a little mental magic on this new intruder.

"Don't!" Steve cries, a moment too late.

Wanda drops to her knees with a horrified look on her face. "Who _are_ you?" she whispers.

The Winter Soldier bolts, and _that's_ when Sam takes two bullets to the wing-pack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that this ending may feel a little bit abrupt, but I intend it to lead easily into the Ant-Man post-credits scene, which doesn't give me or the story much room to navigate past this point.


End file.
